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I had already been feeling some of the residual sadness of another September 11th in America, and then the headlines screamed out that there had been another 9/11 tragedy. The deaths of an American ambassador and three of his staff, killed - as they often say about police officers or soldiers - in the line of duty.
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It is almost as if God had sent us an angel. We were coming back from a Christmas party years ago. All five members of the Hutchcraft family together with the families of the youth ministry I worked for had been there for the annual Christmas party.
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When my wife and I were raising our three children, communication during the early morning shift at our house was, shall we say, non-verbal. There I was, getting ready for my day. The kids were getting ready for school, and my wife was doing her role of maid, chef, valet, chauffeur.
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There are those moments when I make life much harder than it has to be, and in fact sometimes I wonder if I'm slipping. There was a time not too long ago when I looked frantically for my house keys. And, of course, I mobilized the whole family and said, "I've got to get out of here! I'm running late! Everybody go on a search mission; we've got to find my keys." I found them in the door right where I'd left them.
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They're the guys who wear dark glasses, talk to their wrist, and wear that trademark stone face. Yep! They're the almost legendary Secret Service agents who guard the life of the President of the United States.
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Winter came early to the mountains where we were spending our summer vacation. Of course, that's to be expected if we're on vacation; in the summer, it's probably going to get to be winter. But one night the temperature actually dropped into the 30s and no one was prepared for that. We're in this little cabin, and all of us… suddenly we are snuggling under this warm, Hudson Bay blanket. Therefore, we actually didn't have any awareness of how cold it was outside, because, well, we were warm.
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Each of our three children learned the Heimlich maneuver in school. You probably know what that is. If someone is choking, you get behind them; you do the magic squeeze to dislodge whatever they are choking on. It keeps them from choking to death.
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Maybe it's because of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Yeah, as a boy watching that show on TV, I was fascinated watching my Mountie hero racing across the snow with his dog team. I even wore pants that were marked "husky."
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So after the Super Bowl everybody wanted to talk about the commercials. Great! I wanted to talk about the Giants.
Yeah, my team won the Super Bowl! Who cares about the commercials? Answer: the news, the blogosphere, social networks, gazillions of people at the water cooler! Of course, at $3.5 million a pop for a 30-second ad, advertisers were hoping we would talk about their commercial and buying what they were selling.
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I remember not long ago, this hot summer day when my oldest son and I were out working in the yard. I was doing the mowing; he was doing some clipping around the rocks; working just a little bit behind me where I had just mown. And I noticed that he was working pretty hard, and I glanced at him. I was pretty pleased with how he was doing, and I just kind of gave him a quick smile and went back to work.
